chasing after championships.

Early this morning, my mentor and friend Carlo passed away after a long battle with Cancer. I worked with Carlo for almost 3 years, and he's one of the first people I ever looked up to professionally. I've always admired how he carried himself because he made everything look so easy. With his wit and deadpanned facial expressions, he always had the ability to make anyone laugh. And he's the only person I know that can step on stage in front of 1000 people rocking prescription sunglasses (he left his glasses in a taxi).

The first time he interviewed me, he told me that if I told him I was a Manchester United follower, I would be fired immediately. Thank God I wasn't.

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When we first got Keopi, most of our friends and family had a similar response: "how in the world will you have time for a dog?" Neither of us had ever been a pet owner before (apparently Jan had a fish, I don't count that), and between working full time jobs and serving with Vibrant and CCCC, life kept us pretty busy.

I wish I had a smooth answer, but to be honest, we hadn't really spend too much time thinking about it. Instead, when Keopi jumped into our arms and became part of our lives, we simply decided we'd make time.

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Michael Jordan. Pavel Bure. Paul Kariya. Joe Sakic. Markus Naslund. Steve Nash. Ray Allen. Kobe Bryant. These were the athletes that I idolized growing up. They were leaders. They were my heroes. I spent thousands of hours memorizing their stats from their trading cards (pre-internet), studying their moves, and reading any newspaper article I could find on them. Once, I even won a speech contest talking about one of them (it's not who you think it is). In the playground, in my living room - I pretended I was them. As an only child, some of my greatest memories was with them. And yes, I still scream "Kobeee" when throwing paper balls into a trash can. I'm aware how feeble young Sam sounds, but sports fandom was a big chapter in my life.

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When I started anothersamchan.com many moons ago, I was a bored and ambitious college kid, eager to make my mark on the world (wide web). I blogged about sports, I blogged about school, I blogged about tech, and at one point, I probably blogged about blogging.

I got a lot out of it. I made my first dollar on the internet. I was interviewed on tv because of my blog. I learned a great deal about HTML, Wordpress, SEO, and design. I became a much better writer, even if this post doesn't reflect it. A lot of people overuse the phrase, but blogging really did change my life. I started out blogging to share things that mattered to me in life, but it changed very quickly. It became a brand building tool, a skill building tool, a resume building tool. More and more, I used blogging to build up my career and I wrote what I thought my ideal readership wanted to see. When I worked in sports, I wrote about sports. When I worked in tech, I wrote about tech. In short, I stopped sharing what was on my mind and instead wrote to create a persona that was smart, funny, and always the right guy for the job. That's when I found blogging to be a lot less interesting, and a lot more like work. That's not what I plan to do here.

Unfortunately, this blog will not be written with you, the reader in mind. If you're reading this to get to know about me as a potential partner, know that I am honest, hardworking, handsome, and good at alliteration. I am not succinct with my words. That should give you a good enough idea of who I am.

Instead this blog will be used to share my learnings, my successes and failures. Some of my thoughts will be unfinished. Some of my thoughts will be flat out wrong. My new posts will sound hypocritical when compared with my old posts. You may call it contradiction but I call it growth.

Maybe I will use the blog to make life announcements. I'm not sure, I haven't decided, and I'm learning to be ok with that.

Janitta may guest post here from time to time. She is a huge inspiration to me, and her wisdom goes much deeper beyond her youthful frame.

Finally, I will explore my relationship with Jesus here. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. We live in an age where our faith is supposed to be kept to ourselves, but every day that makes a little less sense to me. I am going to share my thoughts on what I live for. We don't need to agree. We can still be friends.

I won't be showing my sneaker collection here. That's what instagram is for.I won't be ranting about sports on here. That's what twitter is for. I won't be writing about tech or business here. That's what medium and linkedin are for.

If sneakers, sports, tech, or biz were all you wanted to hear about from me, that's awesome. I really appreciate that you cared enough to look me up, but you won't find those things here.

If you've read to the end and you're still interested in what I have to say, perhaps this could be a lot of fun. or maybe it won't.